Science and the Quest for Consciousness

Harvard FAS

In 1990, in a paper cited more than 3,000 times, Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Francis Crick and neurobiologist Christof Koch declared "the time is now ripe for an attack on the neural basis of consciousness." Thirty years later, though, we have largely lost the bullish certainties of the 1990s. People still speak of "consciousness studies," but it is unclear who polices the borders of that field. Instead, we see increasing interest in phenomena that even a decade ago would have been…